Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
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But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.
> Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music
What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
That's unfortunately not true.
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs
That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.
"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
You're thinking of Daniel Elk (Spotify co-founder and CEO) and Ludvig Strigeus, who ran uTorrent before building Spotify.
Thanks!
it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast
Citation?
To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
The article said the Spotify CEO was CEO of uTorrent. And Spotify used files employees got from The Pirate Bay. Not what the HN comments claimed.
I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.
The music streaming services are also the easiest way to pirate music.
Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant.
But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things.
My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)